In France the principal representative of phenomenology in the mid-20th century was Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61). Merleau-Ponty rejected Husserl’s bracketing of the world, arguing that human experience of the world is primary, a view he encapsulated in the phrase “the primacy of perception.” He furthermore held that dualistic analyses of knowledge, best exemplified by traditional Cartesian mind-body dualism, are inadequate. In fact, in his view, no conceptualization of the world can be complete. Because human cognitive experience requires a body and the body a position in space, human experience is necessarily perspectival and thus incomplete. Although humans experience a material being as a multidimensional object, part of the object always exceeds their cognitive grasp just because of their limited perspective. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty developed those ideas, along with a detailed attack on the sense-datum theory (see below Perception and knowledge).
The epistemological views of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) are similar in some respects to those of Merleau-Ponty. Both philosophers rejected Husserl’s transcendental reductions and both thought of human reality as “being-in-the-world,” but Sartre’s views have Cartesian elements that were anathema to Merleau-Ponty. Sartre distinguished between two basic kinds of being. Being-in-itself (en soi) is the inert and determinate world of nonhuman existence. Over and against it is being-for-itself (pour soi), which is the pure consciousness that defines human reality.
Jean-Paul Sartre, 1968. Gisele Freund
Later Continental philosophers attacked the entire philosophical tradition from Descartes to the 20th century for its explicit or implicit dualisms. Being/nonbeing, mind/body, knower/known, ego/world, being-in-itself/being-for-itself are all variations of a pattern of thinking that the philosophers of the last third of the 20th century tried to undermine. The structuralist Michel Foucault (1926–84), for example, wrote extensive historical studies, most notably The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), in an attempt to demonstrate that all concepts are historically conditioned and that many of the most important ones serve the political function of controlling people rather than any purely cognitive purpose. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) claimed that all dualisms are value-laden and indefensible. His technique of deconstruction aimed to show that every philosophical dichotomy is incoherent because whatever can be said about one term of the dichotomy can also be said of the other.
Michel Foucault.Alexis Duclos/AP/REX/Shutterstock.com
Dissatisfaction with the Cartesian philosophical tradition can also be found in the United States. The American pragmatist John Dewey (1859–1952) directly challenged the idea that knowledge is primarily theoretical. Experience, he argued, consists of an interaction between living beings and their environment. Knowledge is not a fixed apprehension of something but a process of acting and being acted upon. Richard Rorty (1931–2007) did much to reconcile Continental and analytic philosophy. He argued that Dewey, Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein were the three greatest philosophers of the 20th century specifically because of their attacks on the epistemological tradition of modern philosophy.
John DeweyEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
A.P. Martinich
Analytic epistemology
Analytic philosophy, the prevailing form of philosophy in the Anglo-American world since the beginning of the 20th century, has its origins in symbolic logic (or formal logic) on the one hand and in British empiricism on the other. Some of its most important contributions have been made in areas other than epistemology, though its epistemological contributions also have been of the first order. Its main characteristics have been the avoidance of system building and a commitment to detailed, piecemeal analyses of specific issues. Within that tradition there have been two main approaches: a formal style deriving from logic and an informal style emphasizing ordinary language. Among those identified with the first method are Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), Alfred Tarski (1902–83), and W.V.O. Quine (1908–2000), and among those identified with the second are G.E. Moore (1873–1958), Gilbert Ryle (1900–76), J.L. Austin (1911–60), Norman Malcolm (1911–90), P.F. Strawson (1919–2006), and Zeno Vendler (1921–2004). Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) can be situated in both groups—his early work, including the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), belonging to the former tradition and his later work, including the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953) and On Certainty (1969), to the latter.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of analytic philosophy is its emphasis on the role that language plays in the creation and resolution of philosophical problems. Those problems, it is said, arise through misunderstandings of the forms and uses of everyday language. Wittgenstein said in that connection, “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of the intelligence by means of language.” The adoption at the beginning of the 20th century of the idea that philosophical problems are in some important sense linguistic (or conceptual), a hallmark of the analytic approach, has been called the “linguistic turn.” Commonsense philosophy, logical positivism, and naturalized epistemology
Three of the most-notable schools of thought in analytic philosophy are commonsense philosophy, logical positivism, and naturalized epistemology. Commonsense philosophy is the name given to the epistemological views of Moore, who attempted to defend what he called the “commonsense” view of the world against both skepticism and idealism. That view, according to Moore, comprises a number of propositions—such as the propositions that Earth exists, that it is very old, and that other persons now exist on it—that virtually everybody knows with certainty to be true. Any philosophical theory that runs counter to the commonsense view, therefore, can be rejected out of hand as mistaken. Into that category fall all forms of skepticism and idealism. Wittgenstein also rejected skepticism and idealism, though for very different reasons. For him, those positions are based on simplistic misunderstandings of epistemic concepts, misunderstandings that arise from a failure to recognize the rich variety of ways in which epistemic terms (including words such as belief, knowledge, certainty, justification, and doubt) are used in everyday situations. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein contrasted the concepts of certainty and knowledge, arguing that certainty is not a “surer” form of knowledge but the necessary backdrop against which the “language games” of knowing, doubting, and inquiring take place. As that which “stands fast for all of us,” certitude is ultimately a kind of action: “Action lies at the bottom of the language game.”
G.E. Moore, detail of a pencil drawing by Sir William Orpen; in the National Portrait Gallery, LondonCourtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London
The doctrines associated with logical positivism (also called logical empiricism) were developed originally in the 1920s and ’30s by a group of philosophers and scientists known as the Vienna Circle. Logical positivism became one of the dominant schools of philosophy in England with the publication in 1936 of Language, Truth, and Logic by A.J. Ayer (1910–89). Among the most influential theses put forward by the logical positivists was the claim that in order for a proposition with empirical content—i.e., one that purports to say something about the world—to be meaningful, or cognitively significant, it must be possible, at least in principle, to verify the proposition through experience. Because many of the utterances of traditional philosophy (especially metaphysical utterances, such as “God exists”) are not empirically verifiable even in principle, they are, according to the logical positivists, literally nonsense. In their view, the only legitimate function of philosophy is conceptual analysis—i.e., the logical clarification of concepts, especially those associated with natural science (e.g., probability and causality).